


Echoes

by MadHattie



Category: 999: Nine Hours Nine Persons Nine Doors - Fandom, Zero Escape (Video Games), Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward - Fandom
Genre: 999 Spoilers, Alternate Universe, Gen, vlr spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-01
Updated: 2015-08-01
Packaged: 2018-04-12 09:16:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,148
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4473728
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MadHattie/pseuds/MadHattie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In a universe where the Nonary games never happened, espers feel the echoes of the universe where they do.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Echoes

Somewhere in another universe…

(-)

Akane Kurashiki, age twelve, wakes up in the middle of the night feeling like every cell in her body is on fire. She cries her eyes out, but the tears do nothing to help the pain. It takes her brother Aoi half an hour to calm her down, but by then the pain has gone. In its place is an unsettling empty feeling. She’s not sure which is worse.

(-)

Junpei Tenmyoji is twenty-one when he wakes up from a dream about his childhood friend Akane. He thinks it’s kind of strange, they haven’t seen each other in forever, but he brushes it off the way one always does with dreams. He can’t even remember what the dream was about, just that Akane was there, and that they had to find a way out of some place. By the end of the day he’s forgotten about it entirely.

(-)

Light Field feels like he’s trapped. He had told himself that today would be the day that he would finally finish that audiobook that he's been working on, but the feeling of being entombed is so strong that he can’t concentrate on what the reader is saying. He feels like he’s boxed in, like if he reaches out his hand he’ll feel smooth wooden walls instead of air. He doesn’t know what to do except to pause his book and wait for the feeling to pass. He hopes that Clover will come home soon.

(-)

Hazuki Kashiwabara's daughters have been acting strangely. Over the course of a couple days the two of them seem to have gotten very close, and very quiet. They haven’t been bickering like they normally do. In fact, they both seem afraid to let the other out of their sight. Hazuki resolves to ask them about what’s going on after she gets home from work. Whatever it is, she hopes that it’s not enough to warrant another doctor’s visit.

(-)

Aoi Kurashiki has always been protective of his sister. He realizes that it’s at least partially because of their situation (you can’t act as a surrogate parent to someone without being at least a little protective of them), but sometimes he feels like maybe it goes beyond just that. Ever since she came into his room in the middle of the night, screaming about being burned alive, he feels like there’s something that he needs to protect her from. For weeks he can’t help but be suspicious of every new person that he meets. Every single one seems like they could snatch up Akane and take her away from him forever.

(-)

Akane decides to skip class when she feels a wave of unexplainable anxiety, enough to make her nauseous. She definitely doesn’t regret her choice when the anxiety worsens, coupled with a fever that, while not as hot as the flames she felt when she was twelve, still leaves her woozy. Then, after several hours of uneasiness, comes a white-hot pain like a blade in her back. She struggles to catch her breath as the emptiness returns, even worse than it had before. Even weeks later she can’t shake the feeling that she has lost something much more dear to her than she will ever know.

(-)

Clover Field does a double-take when she sees a woman who looks almost like an Egyptian princess pass her by on the street. There’s something familiar about her, something Clover can’t place a finger on. For some reason she feels like she trusts the woman, like if she ever ended up in a bad situation the woman would come to help her. She doesn’t go after her, but she resolves to tell Light about the experience once she gets home. He always knew what to do.

(-)

Sigma Klim wakes up on his couch on Christmas Day, 2028 with a crick in his neck and his shoes still on. He doesn’t remember falling asleep here, but here he is. Last night was a caffeine and panic fueled blur, so he’s not surprised when his head rushes and aches as he sits up. He feels like he’s aged forty years in the span of a night. Could writing a paper really have taken that much of a toll on him? He thought that it hadn’t been that awful, but now he worries if the end result is even coherent. Ah, screw it. It’s not like I can fix it now. He thinks as he idly rubs at a pain in his wrist. I’m doing pretty well in that robotics class anyway; it’s not like one bad essay will kill my grade.

(-)

Phi clutches at the brooch pinned to her vest for what feels like the thousandth time that night. The smooth silver feels cool and familiar beneath her fingers. She traces the outline of the woman with her thumb. In her mind the words etched on the back repeat themselves like a chant. Elapsam semel occasionem non ipse potest Iuppiter reprehendere. Elapsam semel occasionem non ipse potest Iuppiter reprehendere. Elapsam semel… Those words had always been a reassurance to her whenever she had to make a tough decision, and a way of moving on after she knew that she had made a mistake. Now, though, she can’t see the truth in them at all. She can see all of her choices stretched out behind her, every bad decision, every lost opportunity. She knows how she could fix them all; all she would have to do is jump back in time. But you can’t do that, she tells herself. Not even Jupiter can fix his mistakes. The box has been opened, and Schrödinger’s Cat is dead. There’s no point in wishing that things had happened differently. With a sigh she lets her fingers slip away from the brooch. She needs to sleep for a long time to clear her head.

(-)

Akane Kurashiki is sixty-eight years old when she feels the rumblings of another world deep within her bones. It has been fifty-six years since she woke up to the feeling of being burned alive, forty-seven since she felt cold steel buried in her back. She still doesn’t know what those incidents meant, but she is no longer afraid. She sits back in her chair and lets the alien feelings wash over her. She hears the click of her own boots against steel floors, catches a tiny glimpse of a blonde boy asleep on the ground. Then she sucks in a breath as the blade pierces her heart. It feels like the world is ending, but she knows that it isn’t. Not here, at least. Not this world. She can still see time, branching out like a river before her, just like it had when she had first seen it, twelve and on fire. She still has many miles to go in this universe before the echoes of her death fade into another.


End file.
